U.S. Accepts Trinity’s Plan to Test Design of Guardrail

The federal government has accepted Trinity Industries’ plans for testing highway guardrail products that are suspected of malfunctioning during crashes and potentially slicing through vehicles, even as lawmakers and lawyers criticized their adequacy.

The Federal Highway Administration asked for the crash tests in October, one day after a jury found Trinity liable for defrauding the agency and more than two and a half years after the agency learned that Trinity had failed to report potentially dangerous design changes to its guardrails.

The agency has, in the meantime, approved the guardrail unit, called the ET-Plus, for federal reimbursement even as state officials have raised concerns. More than 30 states have now banned the ET-Plus, and Trinity has halted sales of the units until testing can be completed.

Gregory G. Nadeau, the Federal Highway Administration’s acting administrator, said on a conference call with reporters that he estimated there were about 200,000 of the guardrail units on roads across the nation. But he said that figure might change because some states did not have complete inventories of the guardrail systems.

On Wednesday, the Federal Highway Administration said it would observe the crash tests, which will occur between November and January. Trinity said it would complete the tests as soon as possible.

The guardrail system works by collapsing when hit head-on, absorbing the impact of a crash and guiding the rail out of a vehicle’s path. The rail head or end terminal, often marked with yellow and black stripes, is supposed to slide along, pushing the guardrail to the side.

Trinity’s redesign narrowed the channel behind the head, which can cause it to jam, state officials have said. When that happens, the rail can pierce the vehicle itself.

The lawsuit against Trinity was brought by Joshua Harman, a competitor who discovered that the company made changes in 2005 to its rail head but did not tell the Federal Highway Administration for seven years, despite requirements that such changes be reported immediately. In October, the jury returned a $175 million fraud verdict against Trinity, which will be tripled under federal law. The lawsuit was filed on the agency’s behalf, but it did not participate in the action.

After the federal agency released Trinity’s test plan, lawyers for Mr. Harman and some victims of accidents involving the ET-Plus immediately fired back, arguing that it was inadequate. Real-world drivers, they said, have been hitting the guardrail end terminals from a slight angle of about five degrees, rather than dead-center, but the agency is not requiring such tests.

During the trial, testimony revealed that Trinity and its research partner, the Texas Transportation Institute, conducted five additional tests of a modified ET-Plus in 2005 and 2006, and never disclosed them to federal officials. All five tests failed.

Trinity has said that the tests were only an experiment to see whether ET-Plus guardrails with a more “flared” design would work and that the new style was never put into production. The plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the tests show vulnerability in ET-Plus units on the road. The Federal Highway Administration said on its website that it is assessing requests for low-angle testing and will consider whether additional evaluations are warranted.

Joining the fray, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote a scathing letter to the Federal Highway Administration, calling the testing proposal “far too deferential to Trinity.” Mr. Blumenthal particularly raised concerns that the federal agency was allowing Trinity to use an old set of testing standards that has since been updated with stricter safety requirements — for instance, testing at a shallow angle.

Roadside safety devices developed or significantly modified after 2011 must be tested under the updated guidelines. On the other hand, hardware that had already been accepted under the older standard does not have to be retested under the newer guidelines.

The federal agency said that, because it deemed the ET-Plus eligible for federal funding back in 2005, it would need to meet the older guidelines. It did not, however, did not address the fact that the company was found liable for fraud associated with that acceptance process.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, also called on the Federal Highway Administration to use the more updated crash tests.

“F.H.W.A. should be exhaustive in efforts to determine the performance of the ET-Plus,” Senator Schumer wrote to Mr. Nadeau in a letter that will be sent on Thursday.

Tests in 2005 and 2010 were conducted with the help of the Texas Transportation Institute, part of Texas A&M University and now called the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The institute owns the patent to the ET-Plus, which it licensed to Trinity for millions of dollars. But the safety agency barred the institute from participating in the new tests.

The Southwest Research Institute does not have a financial interest in the product, according to the federal agency.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Accepts Trinity’s Plan to Test Design of Guardrail. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe